I am trying to find a way to remove all from a tag pair in VS Code.
I’ve been using Notepad++ for this purpose, but for some unknown reason it doesn't work all the time. So, I hope if there is such a possibility in VS Code, it’d be more reliable.
Here is the instruction for Notepad++:
Search for -
<wp:post_name>[^<>]+</wp:post_name>
and replace all with -
<wp:post_name></wp:post_name>
Is there anything like this in VS Code?
I’d really appreciate it if someone can help.
Before using what is suggested in this solution, backup your files, and run the search and replace on a small sample. Be sure to check the outcome to all the possible combinations you can have in your files.
You can achieve what you need with Notepad++ (and SublimeText 3, with RegEx search and replace), and this answer will cover that. Since I've never used Visual Studio Code, I can't say if it will work in it as well.
Consider the following regular expression.
<foo>(.*?)<\/foo>
If we were to apply it to the following text:
<foo><some special chars>!##$%^&*</foo> sure, why not
<foo>Lorem</foo>
<foo>ipsum</foo>
<foo>sit</foo>
<foo>dolor</foo>
<foo>amet</foo>
<bar>elm stuff</bar>
more stuff for you <foo> something </foo> and even more stuff <foo>yes</foo>
it would match all the parts of the text which begin with <foo> and end with </foo>, regardless of what's between them.
If you want to play around with this, I've created an example here.
As far as using this in Notepad++, open the search window, navigate to the Find in files tab, and set it up like in the following image.
You would, of course, need to change the search and replacement strings to those you plan on using, optionally set up a file extension for which to do the replacement (Filters), and set the directory in which to perform find-and-replace.
Limitations
1. Nesting
In case your text contains nested tags of the same kind, like this:
Let's deal with nesting: <foo> some text <foo> a child foo!</foo> let's close the parent</foo>
doing the suggested RegEx search and replace, will turn the previous line of text into this:
Let's deal with nesting: <foo></foo> let's close the parent</foo>
If you don't have nested tags of the same kind, you should be in the clear. Unless...
2. Newlines
The provided RegEx will not match cases where your opening tag shows up in one line, and the closing tag shows up in another line. To match those, you would need to change the original RegEx:
<foo>(.*?)<\/foo>
to this:
<foo>([\s\S]*?)<\/foo>
\s will match any whitespace character (including newlines), while \S will match any non-whitespace character.
I have a data file (comma separated) that has a lot of NAs (It was generated by R). I opened the file in vim and tried to replace all the NA values to empty strings.
Here is a sample slimmed down version of a record in the file:
1,1,NA,NA,NA,NATIONAL,NA,1,NANA,1,AMERICANA,1
Once I am done with the search-replace, the intended output should be:
1,1,,,,NATIONAL,,1,NANA,1,AMERICANA,1
In other words, all the NAs should be replaced except the words NATIONAL, NANA and AMERICANA.
I used the following command in vim to do this:
1, $ s/\,NA\,/\,\,/g
But, it doesn't seem to work. Here is the output that I get:
1,1,,NA,,NATIONAL,,1,NANA,1,AMERICANA,1
As you can see, there is one ,NA, that is left out of the replacement process.
Does anyone have a good way to fix it? Thanks.
A trivial solution is to run the same command again and it will take care of the remaining ,NA,. However, it is not a feasible solution because my actual data file has 100s of columns and 500K+ rows each with a variable number of NAs.
, doesn't have a special meaning so you don't have to escape it:
:1,$s/,NA,/,,/g
Which doesn't solve your problem.
You can use % as a shorthand for 1,$:
:%s/,NA,/,,/g
Which doesn't solve your problem either.
The best way to match all those NA words to the exclusion of other words containing NA would be to use word boundaries:
:%s/,\<NA\>,/,,/g
Which still doesn't solve your problem.
Which makes those commas, that you used to restrict the match to NA and that are causing the error, useless:
:%s/\<NA\>//g
See :help :range and :help \<.
Use % instead of 1,$ (% means "the buffer" aka the whole file).
You don't need \,. , works fine.
Vim finds discrete, non-overlapping matches. so in ,NA,NA,NA, it only finds the first ,NA, and third ,NA, as the middle one doesn't have its own separate surrounding ,. We can modify the match to not include certain characters of our regex with \zs (start) and \ze (end). These modify our regex to find matches that are surrounded by other characters, but our matches don't actually include them, so we can match all the NA in ,NA,NA,NA,.
TL;DR: %s/,\zsNA\ze,//g
Let's say we want to replace "apple" to "banana" in every file in the current project. We can do this with Cmd+Shift+F (Find in Files...) and "Replace" button. But this button replaces all simultaneously. What I want to do is replacing one by one. I know this can be done in a single file with Alt+Cmd+F and "Replace" button.
Is there any ways to do in SublimeText3?
Thank you
You can't replace across multiple files in the same way as you can replace in a single file.
The closest you can get is to use Find in Files, make sure Use Buffer is toggled on, and then use Find to perform the search, a Find Results buffer will open. Now you can use F4 to jump straight to the next results line (Shift+F4 to the previous), but you need to manually move the cursor to the relevant section(s) of the line and make the alterations manually.
When performing replacements across files, if it's not a simple case of replacing all of some text with some other text, I have found it best to use a regex to make sure that only the matches I want changed will get changed. Occasionally, if creating a complex regex, I will end up testing the regex using Find to be certain of what it matches, before then running the same regex with replace.
The search command in vim allows you to place the cursor relative to the search results. For example, /hello/b+2 places the cursor on the first l.
How do I do that with the substitute command?
s/hello/b+2/_/
does not work.
I need this to replace not the entire search string, but a portion of it only (specifically, to blank out all but the first character of a word).
You generally have two options: similar to other regex engines zero-width matches (though with different syntax):
:s/\(he\)\#<=llo/_/
or vim-specific “set the start of the match here”:
:s/he\zsllo/_/
. Also, there is a workaround which will look similar in almost every other regex engine:
:s/\(he\)llo/\1_/
: this captures text that should be unchanged and makes replacement include it.
I've to replace all occurrences of a specific macro inside some(only some amongst dozens) C functions. Since the file is thousands of lines long, with several instances of the macro in all the functions, I'd like to replace all occurrences within the particular function the cursor is currently placed.
I know VIM provides navigation commands (like [[ to go to the beginning of the current function, and then % to find its matching closing brace) , but I can't figure out how to use them to come up with the required search-replace command.
Can anyone help ?
Place your cursor on the first opening brace. Then type v% and you will see the function body get highlighted. Then type the replacement command :s/find/replace/g and hit enter. This will replace within the selected function.
Note: You will see you command prompt change to: :'<,'>:s/find/replace/g.
Although I would also recommend dogbane's solution, I thought I'd also mention the NrrwRgn plug-in. It's quite useful for working on a continuous subset of a buffer.